Succulents and More™

If you asked me what feature I love most about agaves, aloes, and cohorts, I wouldn’t know what to say. At least not right away. But if you pushed a little harder, I’d probably blurt out, “the teeth!” Yep, the teeth. Those small, pointy, and often sharp protrusions along the leaf margin. Why? Because they’re fierce (those plants know how to defend themselves!), and they’re oh so photogenic. See for yourself! Agave horrida Agave oteroi Agave oteroi ‘Filigree’ Agave oteroi ‘Filigree’ Agave ( potatorum ‘Spawn’ × isthmensis ) × shawii Agave impressa Agave impressa Agave bovicornuta ‘Holstein’ Agave bovicornuta ‘Holstein’ Agave pablocarrilloi × isthmensis Agave pablocarrilloi × isthmensis Agave ‘Baccarat’ Agave ‘Sierra Azul’ Agave ‘Sierra Azul’ Dyckia ‘Snaggletooth’ Dyckia ‘Snaggletooth’ Hechtia argentea Bromelia pinguin ‘Qué será’ Hechtia epigyna Aloe aculeata ‘Super Spiney’ Aloe aculeata ‘Super Spiney’ Aloe erinacea Aloe erinacea hybrid Aloe ankoberensis Aloe ‘Swordfish’ Al...

One of the plants Kyle and I got from San Marcos Growers on our recent Santa Barbara trip is Dyckia platyphylla . This terrestrial bromeliad is attractive, easy to grow, hardy for a dyckia (15-20°F), and yet hard to find. I don’t know why. Maybe because dyckias in general don’t get much love? Both Kyle and I think it would make a great landscape plant in zone 8b and up. We bought three 2-gallon pots of Dyckia platyphylla at San Marcos, intending to divide the clumps into individual plants for future sales. Three dense clumps of Dyckia platyphylla I decided to tackle one of the clumps to see how easy (or hard) it is to divide: Many individual rosettes... ...packed together tightly Below is the unpotted clump. I had recently watered it, but you wouldn’t know looking at the root ball. It was so dense that water wasn’t able to penetrate it to any meaningful degree. Since the root ball was so dry, I soaked it overnight: Better. The next step was to assemble the tools: my Root Slayer soil...

As you may know, quite a few of the plants we love and have growing in our gardens aren’t propagated vegetatively, through seeds or offsets, but start life in a lab. This includes not only many of my beloved agaves and mangaves, but also most commercially grown perennials and even the orchids you find in grocery stores and garden centers. And if you think plant tissue culture (micropropagation) is a relatively new thing, you might be surprised to find out that orchids have been tissue cultured on a large scale since the 1960s. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to go on a field trip with my volunteer group from the UC Davis Arboretum Teaching Nursery to visit a plant tissue culture lab in the Sacramento area. I already had a high-level understanding of what tissue culture is and how it’s done, but I had never seen a lab in operation, so I was stoked to go. I read somewhere that a tissue culture lab is essentially a plant factory combined with a surgical operating room. That’s a ...